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The year 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the thirtieth anniversary of the Grenadian and Nicaraguan Revolutions, and as such offered an occasion to assess the complex legacies of revolutionary politics in the Caribbean. This volume considers what we might learn from such revolutionary projects and their afterlives, from their successes and their errors. It explores what struggles, currently underway in the Caribbean, share with these earlier and longer revolutionary traditions, and how they depart from them. It analyzes radical movements in Jamaica, Grenada, Cuba, Venezuela, Guadeloupe, Suriname, and Guyana, not only in their national dimensions, but in terms of their regional linkages and mutual influences.
The chapters are drawn from various disciplines and a range of democratic leftist projects. They consider not only state and party politics, but also civil society, cultural politics and artistic production, strikes, and grassroots activism.
This book was published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Legacies Left Shalini Puri Recovered Histories 2. Resonances of Revolution: Grenada, Suriname, Guyana Rupert Roopnaraine 3. Are you a Bolshevik Or a Menshevik?: Mimicry, Alienation and Confusion in the Grenada Revolution Merle Collins Articles 4. The Cuban Revolution and the Caribbean: Civil Society, Culture, and International Relations Rafael Hernández 5. The Content of Socialism in Cuba Today Rafael Rojas 6. Post-Grenada, Post-Cuba, Postcolonial: Rethinking Revolutionary Discourse in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here Rafael Dalleo Maps Annalee Davis, Independent Visual Artist, Barbados 7. History, Decolonization and the Making of Revolution: Reflections on Writing the Popular History of the Jamaican Events of 1938 Anthony Bogues 8. Revolutionary Praxis in a Post-Neoliberal Era: Media Associations and the New Coalitional Politics in Venezuela Sujatha Fernandes 9. Technification, Sweetification, Treatyfication: Politics of the Caribbean-EU Economic Partnership Agreement Norman Girvan 10. Shifting the Ground Beneath Us: Social Reproduction, Grassroots Women’s Organizing and the 2005 Floods in Guyana D. Alissa Trotz 11. Guadeloupe is Ours: The Prefigurative Politics of the Mass Strike in the French Antilles Yarimar Bonilla 12. Legacies through the Lens: A Photo Essay Kathy Sloane
About the author
Shalini Puri is an Associate Professor of English at the Univerisity of Pittsburgh. She is the author of
The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (Palgrave Macmillan 2004), which won the Gordon and Sybil Lewis Award for best book on the Caribbean, and has edited
Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean (2003). She is currently completing a book entitled
Volcanic Memory: The Grenada Revolution and the Futures of Revolutionary Practice. She is also working on a collaborative project entitled 'Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities'.
Summary
This book is a pan-Caribbean and multidisciplinary study of the successes, failures, lessons, ongoing efforts, and prospects of Left politics from across the Caribbean in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book was published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
